


Freak Flags and the Flying Thereof

by coolkidroland



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Coming Out, F/F, M/M, Slice of Life, the dimivain is a slow burn, the dorogrid more of a simmer
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-07
Updated: 2021-03-07
Packaged: 2021-03-13 02:55:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,754
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29894556
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/coolkidroland/pseuds/coolkidroland
Summary: Sylvain agrees to wingman for Ingrid at a gay bar.This definitely won't have any sort of domino effect.
Relationships: Dimitri Alexandre Blaiddyd/Sylvain Jose Gautier, Dorothea Arnault/Ingrid Brandl Galatea
Comments: 3
Kudos: 23





	Freak Flags and the Flying Thereof

**Author's Note:**

> This is part humor, part fond hate letter to functioning as a twenty-something in NYC, part need to drag every Blue Lion issue out into the beautiful sunshine.
> 
> General content warning: mild to moderate homophobia, both external and internal. Standard canon backstory issues (family death, child abuse, mental illness, what-all) apply. If anything more pressing comes up, I will mark the chapter and put an explanation in the end notes.
> 
> Content(?) warning: Untagged background pairings exist throughout. Nothing wild.

It’s not the first time a girl’s shown up on Sylvain’s doorstep at two in the morning, tear-stained and grim. It’s the first time he lets one in. Ingrid’s not here to tell him he might have chlamydia (unfortunately, he did). She might be here to tell him he’s horrible (unfortunately, he is), but that sounds like a waste of her Friday evening-Saturday morning. He ushers her into the apartment. 

“You look rough.”

She looks like she went out for a run and never stopped, sweat-stained and grimy in her thrift store athleisure, shivering under a thin hoodie. The New York autumn has been making its displeasure known all day, hacking up great gobbits of wind and rain on the regular. Ingrid’s no longer wet, but she does smell a bit like damp golden retriever.

“I - ” she croaks, voice as kicked-around as the rest of her. She drags the back of her hand across both eyes and then her snotty nose, thankfully in that order. 

Sylvain grimaces and passes her a kitchen towel, then starts rooting around for the hot chocolate Mercie likes to squirrel away in other people’s apartments. By the time Ingrid finds her voice again, he’s well into microwaving mugs of milk. 

“I’m gay,” she blurts.

Sylvain blinks at the spinning mugs and tries to remember the emotionally responsible, socially correct answer to that vis a vis two in the goddamned a.m.

Congratulations?

Hi gay, I’m dad? 

Definitely not that one, given the likely sore spot.

Dimitri didn’t so much come out as, well, be so obviously and ardently in a relationship that questioning the semantics of it would have been, like, gauche. 

“Thanks.” He settles on at last, pushing a mug of warm milk and a packet of Swiss Miss across the counter.

She wrinkles her nose at him. “For what?”

To take up the time, he passes her a spoon. What he ends up is still: “I’m not entirely sure. I’m a little drunk? For -- trusting me, I guess.”

In the back of the Alcohol Cupboard lives a dusty bottle of kahlua. He drowns their marshmallows at sea. At least Ingrid looks a little less miserable sitting at the dinky little counter that separates the dinky little kitchen from the weirdly shaped living room in Sylvain and Felix’s weirdly shaped apartment. Sylvain tried with the place, despite the fact that the bathroom is off the kitchen, the other bathroom -- or the cupboard with a toilet -- is off the living room, and you have to go down a murder hallway to get to either bedroom. There are pictures on the walls.

There is also a sword on the wall, because Felix is a serial killer. 

“Why are you drunk?”

He shrugs. “Got bored. Why are you gay?”

She takes a deep gulp of hot cocoa. “Girls? Is Felix home?” 

Pushing herself up on the rungs of the Ikea barstool, she peers over Sylvain’s shoulder like he might be hiding a small, terrible young man in the bathroom. He honestly can’t tell if she’d prefer Felix remain absent for her emotional disgorgement or if he suddenly seems like a more sympathetic audience than Sylvain.

“Felix hasn’t darkened our doorstep in a week. Him and Annie are too busy playing strip parcheesi, or whatever it is they get up to together.”

He texted Mercie on Thursday just to make sure Felix was, you know. Alive. She assured him that they were both breathing but, regretfully, still watching Naruto.

“Oh.” She grimaces. “I was hoping to pull off the bandaid. I’m going to have to do this over and over and -- ” she drags in a shaky, stubborn breath and scrubs her palms against her grubby yoga pants. “And over. Thanks for not saying anything disgusting.”

Sylvain walks around the kitchen island to wrap his hands gently around Ingrid’s shoulders, manfully ignoring the way damp sweater rubs under his fingers.

“Ingrid, please know that in the deepest, darkest pits of my heart, I never want to think about you doing the big sexy.” He gives her a moment to contend with this. “And I’m proud of you.”

She doesn’t quite collapse into his chest to weep, but she does let him hug her. And wipes her nose on his t-shirt. If she were a date, he’d have kicked her out by now. Instead, he pulls away, ruffling her hair into a hopeless mess as he goes.

“Take a shower and you can crash in Felix’s bed. Or we can drink more and eat hot pockets, lady’s choice.”

* * *

After that particular hangover, he doesn’t hear from Ingrid for another week. He doesn’t see her text until he’s led another group of unenthusiastic high schoolers through Art of the Antiquities. These ones won’t even join him in pointing out lewd body parts; they’re bummers, and Sylvain tells them so. Their teacher, who’s been mainlining a parade of Trenta Starbucks cups the entire field trip, agrees. Normally he’d see if she wanted to spend their lunch break ‘touring the facilities,’ but, well, Ingrid text.

Also, last time he got a demerit for quote-Tomfoolery-unquote on the job, the head conservator wouldn’t let him in the basement for  _ days. _

So he abandons the lot of them to their overpriced museum cafe lunch and tucks himself away with his phone and his sad pb&j. Nobody ever wants to come visit the awkward taxidermy exhibit, so its benches are all abandoned. 

All she’s texted is: _You go out, right?_ Which is such a stunning lack of context that he feels empowered to take it as literally as possible.

_ When my keepers allow! _

_I meant to clubs._ Then three disgruntled emojis. She’s probably more irritated that she’s asking than anything.

_ Why Miss Galatea, are you asking me to accompany you to a dance? _

The disgruntled emojis will never contain her. He can practically feel her bad mood oozing through the phone. He shoves the remainder of his sandwich in his mouth and counts down the three minutes until his phone rings.

“I don’t think I know the clubs you want,” he tells her.

“I have a place in mind. I just don’t want to go alone.”

“Bring Dimitri. It’s about time he dusted himself off and got back out there.”

Poor guy. He never really got back on the horse after the whole Thing with Dedue. Felix is mean about it every chance he gets, which is a lot. 

“The point is to go with someone  _ less  _ awkward than I am.”

“Aw, I’m telling him you said that. Mercie?”

“How would I get girls to talk to me if I’m standing next to  _ Mercedes? _ ”

Sylvain’s not an idiot, sometimes. He refrains from agreeing with her. “What about…”

“If you don’t want to go, just say so.”

She tries to sound angry, but mostly it just comes out small and more disappointed than she means. Ingrid hates asking. She also hates getting what she asks for. Christmas presents have to be shoved in the bottom of her suitcase, unwrapped and roundly denied. What! Maybe new snowboots just teleported in there! If they’re sentient, you shouldn’t offend them.

This will be much cheaper.

“I just don’t want to cramp your style with eau de heterosexual. When and where?”

“I’ll pick you up at your place. Tonight?”

“Liking that big butch energy. Can’t tonight, though. Ignatz promised I can watch him clean that Waterhouse, so I have four hours to figure out how not to breathe real loud. Tomorrow?”

“Seven.” Like she’s bringing the firing squad.

He agrees, then lays it on thick about how much he loves her and how excited he is to be a supportive ally until she hangs up on him. 

Just for the fun of it, he texts Dimitri.

_ What do I wear to a gay bar? _

Dimitri fails to reply, which is both entirely expected and deeply offensive. 

* * *

Felix comes home Saturday morning, and it’s Sylvain’s god given right to make him wish he hadn’t. 

“Do you think eyeliner is a little two-thousand-and-late?”

Felix scowls and scrunches himself into a yet smaller, yet more furious ball on the other end of the sofa. He’s always somehow worse when he has to pry himself away from Annette to eat and shower and pay his rent, like a smoker in the first miserable days of cold turkey. 

“Don’t touch my eyeliner,” he snarls. 

It’s  _ tactical _ eyeliner, for when Felix is  _ tactically _ hanging out with his weirdo paintball friends. Sylvain has made it a point to absolutely not know those people. He’s pretty sure that pretendy-fun-violence is for people who haven’t been up close and personal with much painful-ow-violence, but flinging open the door for that hypothesis invites conversations he isn’t prepared to have. 

“Aw, why not?”

“I don’t want herpes.”

“Lucky day, I just got tested!”

“I will waterboard you in the kitchen sink.”

“Don’t make promises you can’t keep, loverboy.”

Felix bares all of his teeth. Sylvain should make  _ him  _ get tested. If he gives Annie rabies, Mercie will murder everyone in their sleep. Just absolutely everybody. 

“Ask Dedue,” Felix suggests at last. “He finally grew standards.”

“You’re so fucking mean,” Sylvain coos. 

As far as Sylvain has been able to pry out of either of them, Felix responded to Ingrid’s tremulous, vulnerable, heartfelt coming out text with a  _ So? _ And then she called him a dick and he felt so bad (just, you know, internally, where no one could see) that he Door Dash’d her some KFC. 

Felix, vehemently, does not want to go to a gay bar, or a straight bar, or an ‘eh, whatever’ bar. He would, reportedly, rather die than have anything more to do with Sylvain on a night out. Rumor has it that Ingrid should get her head examined. Let the record show that Felix is just cranky about that time sophomore year he woke up with his hair bleached, which is an awful long time to be cranky about a thing.

The apartment buzzer interrupts Felix’s determined attempts to overpower Sylvain in his cruel bid to defy the Geneva Convention. Sylvain squirms out from under half of Felix and most of the coffee table and bolts for the door before Felix can get at his ankles. 

They live on the sixth floor of a sixth floor walk-up, which does not-quite-wonders for rent in Manhattan. Rodrigue knows the building owner, which does a fuck of a lot more. 

Sylvain flings himself down the stairwell, nearly taking out a neighbor child as he goes. He’s prepared to kick open the door with a grand flourish and make some sort of Pronouncement. But there’s Ingrid standing in the lobby, no doubt granted entrance by that incautious neighbor child, looking, uh --

Tremulous and sparkly.

Her hands are balled into fists and she’s biting her lip, which is just smearing pale pink lipstick over her front teeth. The boots are hers, and the jeans, but the diaphanous silver top doesn’t look like anything she’s owned since she discovered self-actualization in the third grade. Her hair is up in a fucking  _ chignon.  _

Sylvain catches himself on the last baluster. “Ingrid, darling, you look so fabulous. Your mother would shit herself.”

“My mother would never,” says Ingrid in the tight, controlled tones of someone on the verge of tears or vehicular homicide. “It’s unladylike.”

He peels off his ratty cardigan (their apartment is, somehow, always freezing) and slings it over her shoulders like she showed up with both tits blazing. She pulls it around herself, fingers digging into the wool. Her nails are also sparkly.

“What the hell happened?” he asks as they start the long trek back up.

“Mercedes.”

That is not the tone of voice people generally reserve for Mercedes. 

“Yikes.”

Her indignant snort may or may not cover up a sniffle. “You say that without knowing how many safety pins are holding this top up.”

“Yikes,” says Felix from the floor as they sweep back into the apartment. 

“I’ll kick you right in your stupid nose,” Ingrid says, then drags the back of her hand over her mouth. The lipstick smears across her cheek. “Ugh. Why is this so gross.”

“Ingrid told Mercie that she was going out on the town.”

Felix gives this its two second of due consideration. “Idiot. You know where the shower is.”

“Felix keeps the makeup wipes under the sink,” Sylvain tells her, because he’s a helpful young man.

Ingried abandons Sylvain to Felix’s tender mercies. Which means that by the time she emerges from the bathroom, a towel around her neck and hair dripping all over the pre-war hardwood, Sylvain is sitting on Felix’s back and finishing up his seventh rousing chorus of Henry the VIII.

“Children,” says Ingrid.

“He likes it,” says Sylvain. Felix takes the opportunity to throw an elbow right into his solar plexus, and Sylvain rolls off him with a wheeze.

Ingried stands there in her sports bra and her bare feet, looking very small and very determined. She’s holding Sylvain’s hair scissors, which really rounds out the whole ‘Judith jaunting off to have word with Holofernes’ vibe. She raises her chin.

“Sylvain, I want you to cut my hair.”

Felix hovers in the bathroom doorway the  _ entire time _ , which is completely unfair. Sylvain’s been cutting his own hair since he could claim it was fashion forward of him. All and sundry have accused him of being vain; that’s better than admitting that Miklan once held him down and cut off great, painful fistfuls of Sylvain’s curls. Other people getting near his head with sharp objects makes him a little wiggy, so sue him.

“He’s going to give you a mullet,” Felix warns as Sylvain shears through the weight of Ingrid’s ponytail. 

Sylvain waves the scissors in his direction. “I’ll put some business in your front if you keep up the commentary.” He turns his attention back to Ingrid. “How short do you want it?”

Ingrid is already tugging at the uneven bob with -- not disbelief, Sylvain hopes. He’ll go with quiet awe. They didn’t exactly follow the route of ‘slow and reversible.’ 

“As short as you feel comfortable doing,” she says. “Sorry, this is going to make us late.”

“It’s your party, sweetheart. If you want to spend it getting the chop and downloading the lesbian equivalent of grindr, that’s your business.”

“There isn’t one. That’s why we have to go out.”

Because he’s holding a pair of scissors very close to her face, Sylvain contains his glee. “You looked for lady grindr?”

“Shut up and barber.”

She doesn’t come out of it looking half bad, if Sylvain does say so himself. She has to take another shower, and he’s going to have to spend the rest of his weekend vacuuming, but it’s a small price to pay. He tucks the carcass of her ponytail into a ziplock bag so she can donate it or use it to frighten small children or whatever.

Felix disappears into his bedroom, which is standard Felix operating behavior, but he comes right back out again. After her second shower, Ingrid’s greeted with a faceful of henley and dress shirt. The shirt is that nice shade of blue that’s one of four colors Felix will consent to wearing.

“Don’t get anything weird on it,” he tells her.

She looks like she might cry. Felix lets her hug him for a solid five seconds before he squirms out of her hold and disappears into his Felix cave for good. It’s beautiful. Sylvain might write a poem about it. 

Ingrid completes her very chic look by repossessing Sylvain’s cardigan. Unlike Felix’s clothes, it’s way too big on her, but the soft gray cuts up the blue-on-blue-jeans look she’s rocking. Anyway, it’s cozy. Sylvain’s going to have a few words with Mercie about sending Ingrid out into the night all tarted up and bare-armed. Because he’s been so very charitable, Ingrid raises her eyebrows at his leather jacket but doesn’t actually  _ say _ anything. He knows it looks like the sort of douchey thing he would have worn during his first go at college, but this one he found in a thrift store, and well, sometimes his fashion sense drifts douchey. He’s practicing radical self-acceptance.

Sylvain’s phone buzzes in his pocket on the way down the subway steps. Dimitri’s given him a much belated reply

_ I assumed you were being facetious. You look nice in green. _

Which is a fucking lie, since green just makes him look like an unhappy Christmas. Sweet, though.


End file.
